The Trøndersk Blog

I have not been that active, but here I am.

The last month or so I've been exploring more of emacs and lisp, and i made a small lisp of my own in scheme. I just wanted to mention this.

Now, today i wish to write about Emacs. It's been my main editor since late november/eraly december now, and I am falling deeper into it for each day. At the moment I do my email in it, this blog post is in org mode, I manage my git repos in it, read docs, wrote docx documents with org mode, mange my files in it and I use irc in it. This is just a few actions I use emacs for a lot now.

As you may see I like it. And I just use built-in functions and some I made myself with elisp. Emacs lips in of itself is really simple too, and for those who wish to try emacs, but is scared by it, you can stumble around on emacs fr years withouth needing it. It is a super powerfull tool as well, that can handle everything you ever need. Now, in emacs i have my own setup, with a dashboard, themes, modelines and functions and some custum binds I've set up that I use daily, and it feels weird to another editor. Something as simple as being able to write an email withouth opening an external application helps a ton to not loose a thought. It was a shorter one today, but i can end with some killer features of Emacs i now feel like I cannot live without:

• Org mode for docx and blog posts and documentation
• rmail for email
• vc for git control, overview and management
• compilemode for error handling, jumping and integration to the editor
• erc for irc (maybe smaller, but i use it a lot).

That was all for today. Bye!

This is a small rant. Lately I have been a little active in Tony Banters discord server, tonybtw on youtube. He is the one that got me down this path.

This in particular started when he made a comment to someone saying they liked the openness of the Mit license and how it didn't have any restrictions.

This thought has evolved some over time, and now we both call it an empty file. This is the mit license. It just says who made it, when and that it is provided as is.

This makes it so there are no restrictions on the usage for the usage of the software licensed with this license, and you can see that lately more and more projects have switched to this license in the foss world.

This largely also come from that rust as a language has gotten more popular and that the rust project itself is largely mit. This weakens the foss and open source world, even if it on the surface is more open, and therefore allow wider and more general modification, use and distribution of the original software. This is as Mit does not set any restrictions at all, and so allow selling and harmful (for foss) use of the software.

If one wish so they can take any Mit licensed software, lets say ripgrep, it is licensed under the Mit license, which allow any modification and redistribution you want of the software. A company may now use this, modify it, change the name, close it off and sell it.

This can be harmful as more and more use this license and so companies have more to choose from and use, and this has happened multiple times where someone has sold what is essentially a fork and modifications of a foss and open source project. This is against my idea at least of what open source is for. It's for the best for as many people as possible, and not the freedom to misuse someone else's work. the largest example of this is MacOS.

This is not a Mit licensed 'fork' but rather a BSD licensed project thats modified and worked on. Apple had OsX, An OS that was closed and for mac that they themselves had made. The modern MacOS is a modification of the BSD project and the Mach microkernel, which hurd also use at it's base. The difference between GNU Hurd and apples macos is that GNU, as it may be self explanatory is GNU and licensed with the GPL license, where mac uses a highly restrictive and closed license that does not allow modification or source code to the user and public, and will go to legal action if you get a glimpse at it.

This is the difference, when a project, lets say Alpine Linux does something they want to share their creation for use and so that other can get something out of it and so that the user may modify and make it fit their usecase as much as they want. They believe that it should be open for others, so it can be shared and enjoyed, while a closed OS or project wants software to earn money and limit competition. Something like Mit, Bsd or GPL does not limit software to be free as in free beer, but rather free as in you are free to modify and use the source when you have obtained it, if it's through a monetary transaction or if it's hosted in a public git repository does not matter.

When you have the project you have the ability to read, modify and use the source code. While GNU, BSD and so on all allow this the GNU license says "You must keep the content free and libre, if you distribute this as a fork make it so that when the user has the product you need to provide the source code as well". This is what keeps the software truly libre and free. If one can just take a copy of the project, license it as a closed source license and say, no you may not see what we do or how we do this it may as well contain malware or anything they want, but you may not know, as you can never see what they do.

So in the end I want to ask this, do you want to allow a trust in software or do you want to allow software to be closed off and do anything they want with others work and hide what they truly do with your data, computer and what you depend on?

As I end this I want to say, use GPL for the future, we cannot afford open and good projects made for the peoople to be exploited, used for greed and sold without giving anything back to the original makers and distributors of the source.

Gnu for an open alternative, freedom of software and to be secure against tracking, malware and a surveillance based society and future.

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Since the beginning of time power has corrupted us humans. This can be seen time on time again in older text, let us first look at a short example. Humans realised that we could gather and become our own overlords, even when we were instructed not to. As so we started to build a tower (the tower of babel, the allknowing civilization), a tower to reach the sky and go beyond. This was straight against what we were told. And so, we believed we could be the rulers of the world just because we got some more power than earlier. This isn't related to software at all, but the tale can be seen in it.

Look at so called proprietary software, also called non-free and often see similarities with malware. The user does not know exactly what this piece of software does, and hides it's processes. At first they may close it off as it's in beta (even if that also is wrong) like the terminal emulator ghostty. Or maybe they are afraid that a competitor takes what they made and sell it on, even if they use a license that say they cannot do this. Even if I'm all for the gpl there are other licenses that disallow selling their source on.

The start may be noble or have a good cause, but sooner or later they may realise that they can earn more or trick the user into behaving as they wish if they do something one way. Let us take another example, google.

Google had the motto 'don't be evil' and i believe did some really good progress and deeds. But they also realized that they could earn more if they tracked the users every action and hide what they really do with this data. They said it was for giving the user better search suggestions, but at the same time they gathered even more data to personalise advertisement. This has gone on for over two decades now, and you can notice if you talk a lot about babies you will get advertisement related to this.

It started as a tool that was good and useful, but as they saw that they could use this trust to extract data and sell it. And as google has a hand, eye and an ear in every process on the internet they know everything you do there. They also sell this information, so sellers, goverments or other commercial actors can easily get ahold of your data, behaviour and preferences.

While foss software may also collect information, there you can see what it does, modify and remove it if you so wish or realise what it does easier and change tool. This is were I stand now. I used to use some proprietary tooling, but as i read more and more, and saw more and more telemetry, data collection, leakages, selling data and what I think of as misuse I have moved away from that. An example is how I do not have anything (but the bios) as libre on my main computer.

Now, where todays tag is from. NixOS is almost entirely free as default, if you look away from the proprietary kernel blobs. But to enable it it's one line that's just there in the main default config. Or even worse, a button in the gui installer. This makes it so that 99,99% of nixos users use proprietary tooling in their daily life, and so i will not classify nix as a libre distro. When it's an option every user see it feels more natural than if you have to seek and find it yourself. These closed tools may look good on the outside, but more often than not they have a long list of conditions you agree too, where few even look at it. This also makes it so what they do is fully legal, but does legal always mean moral?

Another example is how some companies have sold user information without telling the user. This can so be misused by goverments in their effort of censorship. Iran, china and russia all gather information from the computer and internet usage from their browsing, games and so on to know and figure out what the people do, think and how they behave. This is something I see as a risk. Here too, in Norway they have pushed for internet surveillance, and as they say it's for security, while the court at the same time says it's illegal, immoral and not needed. People push for less privacy at a time when more and more goverments and companies wish for more control. More knowledge on how the people behave, and use it for their own gain. For a company they mostly wish for profit, where it may push people to overspend and feel like they need to pay and buy a service or good. For a goverment it can be to know how people behave, use it to figure out behaviour they disslike or censor opinions that are against the goverments wishes. All of this goes out on democracy and our freedom and right to a private life.

So when you use a browser, do you wish for someone to track, see and use every action and search you do for advertisement and making a behaviour profile on you? Or do you wish that another third party cannot get the data you have and for a state not to be able to affect you with advertisement, propoganda (like what we saw in the 2016 american election) and censorship?

Gnu for an open alternative, freedom of software and to be secure against tracking, malware and a surveillance based society and future.

• Some things have happened since last time. I will just jump into it. This weekend Ive joined the church of Emacs, and its amazing. The thinges that were 20 lines of lua is now 1 option or two lines of lisp. Lisp as a language family is also way more readable, and the functions in emacs are usally just better, like dired to netrw or the builtin lsp requiering little to none config and setting up. My Emacs config can be found there. I also made, or started on my own emacs theme, which is in the same repo. It is inspired by gruber darker and my previous theme, but simpler than that too. It's good for C and lisp languages now, but that will be expanded if someone asks me to or i see something i want to add. HolyX also needs an artist, conact me if you are one or know one. Emacs out.

• Since last time I've only walked further along the Emacs path, and it is now my primary editor. This weekend I've made a dashboard, so that when you launch emacs you get some info and my custum keybinds. I have also done some work on my theme, and it may remind some people of Gruber Darker, which tsoding use. It is a plessent one, but I still want to make it how I like it, so i would rather make my own. I have also found someones fzf, which i added myself (C-c f/F) to have a file picker with fzf, for fuzzy search. This can all be found on my codeberg, and I've just added some screenshots oin the readme.

• I have now made an org-mode template for exporting to html and css. So now i can write in a markup language for having this site, no more html by hand. This saves a lot and brings iut easier togheter.

• Today i sat down and learned some guile scheme, and ended up with a small note app. this was written in org, so i took notes and explained so taht I can later look back at it. it's at neocities here.

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• Since the last update I've done some simple work on my init.lua. The main thing was changes to how i have diagnostics displayed and a signcolumn change to show more things than just errors. I've also started work on a small note taking syntax for myself, and may become a part in the future, or a seperate thing one coukd try. I will try to simplify the colourscheme for languages like html, as now it looks horrible. I belive so and because of that I'm not satisfied. - I've also started to slowly remove treesitter from my workflow, and soon I think I will just remove it as I've grown attacjed to the regex highlighting, and neovim and vim has good enough indenting without it, and if it's abselutly nececacry i can use the builtin treesitter and manually install the parsers. This will make me less dependent on an external tool, and then only fzf and fd is needed for how it is now. Will replace fd with find soon.

• I have now fixed some diagnostic signs, signcolumn jumping and removed the language specific things from the colourscheme as I do not want anything but base vim/nvim highlighting groups and regex highlighting. Most languages are linked correctly to the proper groups, so that is a cut i did. Some colours are brightend, like the dark blue and green for their lighter counterparts as it fits better with everything else. - Now, the thing i will maybe work more on now, I've added a cn.vim file in the CuteScheme repo under a syntax directory as I'm working on making my own note taking syntax and highlighting. This is simple regex and just some important points for now, but this will improve with time. It's name is CuteNotes as all of my neovim and linux related things all start with Cute, and its for notes, so .cn files.

• Its been a while. I have done a lot since the last update, but now, my current project. I and Kaiser Willhelm of Croatia have started on something like omarchy. As I've stated earlier I'm not a fan of DHH, but I do like how omarchy is to set up. So the goal is an installer for a distro with an iso, this may also just be a calamaries installer or an archinstall profile we provide, but for now its an post install script that sets everything up and so you may just start using the computer with a pre defined configs, the Holy configs. This project is called HolyX and may be found on my codeberg. All software must be open source if we are going to use it and no 'voodoo'. Right now we just got out of planning stage, and this is just a fun side project, so it will take a lot of time before it's done. Some things we wish to add is an automatical updateer for the files that is toggleable, as I stated, an ISO, will be arch based as thats easy and doesnt come with a lot of bloat and some TUIs for the install. The name comes from the goal to have a truly blessed setup, and the X is from us wanting to use xorg as that is indeed the holiest of the options we have. We also want to keep the bash installer as it should be run and play on other distros as well, like gentoo, alpine, debian or fedora.

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• I just moved from github to codeberg. That is because of multiple reasons where just moving away from microsoft is one, that it's hosted in europe is another. But the thing that's maybe the most important is that microsoft reacently moved github under the AI department. That was all for now.

• The adventure to move away from relying on computers is fun, and now I've grown more comfortable with my typewritter, but I have one major issue. How should i scan documents so that i can send them as .pdf files? Right now I'm using google drive (I know) as it's the only service on my phone that supports scanning and making pdfs from a document.
• I have now made a working kernel with core utils and some other software that i pciked out, but i did not like how it was and the bootloader (syslinux), so i will start over on this and maybe try with the lts kernel instead of using the latest one. Also some of the software i had in the install image should be optinal, insted of baked in, so the image shouldnt be too large in size. Will restart on this tomorrow, sunday or on monday.

• Today I have not done much, but I have thought some more about it and have come to the conclusion that i should just do it all over again and not think much of what I did yesterday. I may wait to the next weekend before i set up LFS or something simular again. On another note there have been some minor problems as someone in the next room have been needing it to be quiet, and therefor I could not write and use my typewriter as I normally do. I have also thought about if I should migrate some of my discussion away from discord and maybe matrix to IRC, as I do enjoy it more and one can be more anynomus there than on the platforms I use today. This was a small update on my quest for true freedom on the web and with using a compute.
• I updated my tmux config to make it fit me more, so added session name insted of username to the left, changed the bordercolour from the active opane to magenta and the inactive to cyan. I also changed my neovim configuration file where i merged some lines and functions into one line insted of 5, added some comments to it and got it down to 125 lines in the init.lua file.

-I have not done anything worth noting since yesterday, but I do have something i would like to get off my mind. Lately I've seen more and more about the arch linux setup or window manager setup "Omarchy", and because of that I myself have looked slightly into it even if I would never use it myself as it's smart to at least see what others do and what they like, to see if there is anything I could improve in my setup or if I should look more into that said other setup that mine. But, as omarchy come into the popular view another issue has come forwards, and that's DHHs political views that I myself seem unacsaptable. One article that can explain this better than me is this one, where you can read more indepth around this issue. I will bring the main thing forwards, as many have other thougfhts than me and you we must tolerate that, but when someone says that a city and country is unrecognisable and that he would never even consider visiting because a part of the population is of another ethnisity and have a diffrent colour of their skin I will not support or say much good about their products. I myself do like to think that I have standrads, and hyprland in of itself is too far for me, but with omarchy and this remark from DHH it's at a point where I would like to just say it, don't use it.

• As a small sidenote, i just figured out that codeberg doesn't use javascript, or at least that it isn't needed, so i can use the website and browse on my tinkpad in the TTY in w3m. Thanks a lot, i will now not be depending on my gui computers at all times, but can also use my favourite one.

• Today I've not done much, but something I have been doing is checking out oxwm and nwm by xsoder, both of wich run on around 10mb ram and are x11 window managers, where Tonay have said that he wants to port oxwm to wayland in the distant future. As of the time I'm writing this I'm leaning in the direction of oxwm, but not 100% sure yet. It has a nice bar built-in and has more features, and is simular to dwm in m,any ways, as he himself wanted a 'better DWM'. I will keep Niri for wayland usage, but when I get back home I belive that I will switch my daily WM to oxwm, as it's way lighter, has eveything I want in it and I can support someone that I want to continue doing his work on the tools he creates and his videos. – A little side-note, a friend of mine installed nixos today, and I'm excited to see how he does. Of course I hope he stays, but there is a large chance that he goes back to opensuse, but we can hope he doesnt. That was all for today.

• I have started to try to learn some more about Git today, and will create a part in the rgfzf script to be able to handle the most used git commands and actions through that. So as of right now I can add files, commit them with messages and push the reposetory change. This will be expanded as I feel the need for it, and I will try to learn to use git fugetive plugin for neovim and maybe a tui tool like lazygit if I feel that the rgfzf script is not enough. I have not done much today, but it is a start. I also want to add to the linux distro thing I've hinted about, this will be set on pause til I've made all the tools I want around this distro, so eveything else for it must be in place first, and after that I can continue on that.

• I have now bought an old Acer Aspire x3200 to set up an server. This is as I need a pc to have in case, as a backup and to run a small server as I want to host an IRC for me and my friends, and maybe one for more as well, that will have to wait and see. This is an old pc, but has a 86x 64bit cpu dual core, 2GB ram and two sata slots, and with both HDMI and VGA. I can slighly upgrade this PC later on if i feel like it and I like the case, so that can be reused in the future. As a start I will set up an IRC server I and a friend can test, then invite some more as I go. And a small fun thing is that I know the seller, but didn't find out before I had decided to buy it.

• Today I've used the day to travel, so not done much. I got the server machine to its place and took off the side panel. Some cleaning has started, and I now have to find/buy a sata 3,5 hdd or a sata ssd, where the newer ones will not work. That was all.

• I have now started a really simple emacs configuration. My goal is to maybe switch to guix to get the full emacs and GNU life.

• Since uyesterday I've configured my Emacs. I now have a full evil mode, an easy way for file management, and as I saw Tsoding I wanted to see what he had, so I watched his setting up Emacs on a new laptop video, and there I got some ideas, like IDO and some more. I have written some in a declerative matter, and you may check it out on codeberg, where the .emacs file lays under the HOME directory.

• Today I've not done much, but I have rewritten my .bashrc file and migrated back after half a year on zsh. The plugins I had for zsh are all replaced by the "fzf –bash" options, like inbuilt cd, fuzzy history search and file search. I will try to implement a command fuzzy complete.

• I've updated and reorganised some in the init.lua and in the rgfzf script. This will be the only update here between monday and thursday as I will be gone.

• After a few days gone I've come back, and today I've been working on a small colourscheme for myself for vim/nvim, where all the base colours are set and it works and can be used as my main colourscheme now. I will add or change it as I go, but for lua, bash and markdown it's more than enough. I want a colourscheme that isn't too bright, one that is not a rainbow, but rather one that highlights the important parts and have the same colours repeat many times over as that creats a illusion of harmony for me. And as someone once said, if you focus on eveything you focus on nothing, so 90% of the text is one of two colours, where the main colour is white and thge secoundary is cyan, cyan for variables etc. I will try to limit the use of too many colours, and rather use 'bold' 'italic' and 'underline' insted to highlight something. Red is also a colour reserved for errors and the most important things. The colourscheme is open for change and it probably will change some, or at least get stuff added to it as I see fit. As of right now it's in my codeberg for dotfiles, at configs/oldvim/scheme.vim and is 100% vimscript.

• As I'm writing this on my phone it will be short. I changed and made my vim colourscheme better and softened it some and added a git repo for it (at https://codeberg.org/trondelagcutie/CuteScheme) and made it so you can enable it with :colorscheme cutevim. after that i added fuzzy searching for commands in the commandline.

• Over the last few weeks I've worked on my neovim configuration and some of my other tools that I use on a daily basis, and I belive I've taken yet another step into making it truly good now. As I've said I made my own colourscheme that is being tweaked some times when I see something I don't like. An example is how I want to implement some more yellow, but that is not something I've decided on yet. You can find it at this place and the goal is to highlight the few most important parts of the code I'm working at to make it faster to find what I need. And as I worked on this I thought, why stop here? So I (with a lot of help and inspiration) managed to remove all but two of my plugins. The CMP ones were just unnececary and I could just remove them, I'm still not 100% used to it yet, but it's manageble, and I find that I actually write more myslf and have stopped looking too much on the distracting popup it has. Now, autopair was just a bad habit, so I removed it to make myself write it myself and not rely on it. The hardest part was of course my file picker, I asked some on a community where we could speak about neovim, and a great guy had something he used, a full fledget file picker (with some stuff that's not needed for me so I removed that) in like 200 lines of lua that uses fd and fzf directly into neovim, and not like fzf.vim or fzflua which both are thousands of lines long. This was something I could justify reading and using. So now i have a file picker that's custumisable in the init.lua file that does eveything i need it to, and as a extra it works more like how I want it to and the buffer picker is better as well. I've also started to use a floating terminal insted of making a tmux pane or a tmux popup as this way just feels better and easier to actually manage like a normal terminal. All of this may be seen at my codeberg.

• I have now fixed autocompletion to LSP suggestions, enabled autoformating from the LSP on save and a keybind to enable inline hints from the lsp. There have come some new images on the codeberg and some other smaller improvements.

• Today I've added some stuff for quicklists to my init.lua, as i found that useful a few days ago.

• I have now fragmented and gathered eveything related to each other inb a way in one file each, so lsp is one file, colourscheme is one, completion in one and qflist in pone etc. This is not for the init.lua, but rather for the development and maintence, then i gather them all into one init.lua file after I've done my changes etc. May do a cat "files" > init.lua, but that sounds like a horrible idea, could make a simple bash script to gather and combine it, have multiple files or manually change and add it.
• I have now restructured the init.lua file, or rather named final.lua in the codeberg repo in the neovim directory. It is all sorted out from which file it is in the fragmented maintainer part. Will continue making qflists and improving stuff overall.

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